SSM

Social Simulation and Modelling

Social Simulation is a recent multi-disciplinary effort that has increasingly established new challenges for the Artificial Intelligence and Multiagent Systems community, by bringing the agent technology to face complex phenomena such as the ones found in social sciences. At the same time, social scientists have been discovering how the computer and especially the advances in artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems can provide a new and exciting tool to tackle the problems of their field, providing a paradigm shift in social sciences. The exchange between researchers in both areas has proven mutually fruitful, as much inspiration in Multiagent Systems has come from Social Sciences, and these have benefited from more rigourous and operational concepts as well as from principled methodologies with which to face experiments with heterogeneous artificial agents.

Social Simulation (SS) brings together the multi-agent systems (MAS) and agent-based modelling (ABM) communities. The focus of MAS is on the solution of complex problems related to the construction, deployment and efficient operation of agent-based systems, while the focus of ABM is on simulating and synthesising social behaviours in order to understand real social systems (human, animal and even digital) via the development and testing of new theories. Both these communities are now well-established and have many common issues, but there are few opportunities for crossover of ideas between the two communities.

This track aims at presenting the most recent advances in multi-agent-based exploratory social simulation from a strong computer science and Artificial Intelligence stance. To promote a multi-disciplinary and cross-influential approach, this workshop will focus both on ideas coming from Artificial Intelligence as a new technology to provide insights into ABM community and the ideas coming from social sciences as new metaphors to provide insights into MAS community.